5 Facts About The Soon-To-Be-A-Movie Winchester Mystery House

Did you know a house could get a movie deal? The Hammer production company has optioned the rights to make a movie about The Winchester Mystery House, a.k.a. “America’s most haunted house,” which will be uber scary, assuming they don’t totally fuck it up. Furthermore, they’re going to shoot it at least partially on the house’s spooky premises, which should be fun for them. Basically, the house’s back story is that Sarah Winchester, heir to the Winchester fortune, grew racked with guilt over all the people her family’s guns had killed while America was “winning the West,” fled to San Jose, CA in 1884, and continuously built and remodeled this bizarre house full of twisting hallways and stairways to nowhere in an effort to escape their spirits’ wrath. There aren’t any big names attached yet, but I bet Helena Bonham Carter or Nicole Kidman (circa The Others) would do a bang-up job playing Sarah.

Here are some more key facts about the place:

1. Sarah took her building cues from the spirit world.

Legend has it that Sarah Winchester had a séance each night to determine what crazy shit she should build the next day. The house also incorporated her superstitions, such as a belief in the magical power of spiderwebs and the number 13 (there were 13 of a lot of things. She supposedly believed that she would die if she stopped building. The builders never complained, because she spent a ton of money on them.

2. She was kind of awful to her servants.

She had elaborate spying systems built into the house so she could watch them, and regularly spooked them so badly that they started believing she could walk through walls, teleport, etc.

3. The house was famous in its own time.

High profile visitors to the house included Harry Houdini and President Theodore Roosevelt.

4. Most modern day “mediums” corroborate the house’s haunted-ness.

“Psychic researchers” from the Nirvana Foundation spent a night there and said they noticed organ sounds (Sarah played the organ), moving lights, and spirits, and in 1975, researcher Jeanne Borgen spent a night there and claimed to have made contact with Sarah’s (awful, scary) ghost.

5. People visiting the house corroborate its haunted-ness, too!

For an up to date list of “recent incidents” experienced by the house’s visitors, go here.

Representative example:

I went here for my 13th birthday and i took the behind the scenes tour. In the basement, I saw a man in white overalls, a full beard, and he was pushing a wheel barrow full of coal. When I tried to show my parents he was gone and they looked at me like i was crazy. 0.0